Los Angeles was at the vanguard of the feminist art movement. In 1968 the Romanian-born curator Josine Ianco-Starrels (daughter of Dada pioneer Marcel Janco) organized a women-only show, "Twenty-five Women in Art", at the Lytton Center of the Visual Arts.

Judy Gerowitz (Judy Chicago), had often been the lone woman in the Ferus gallery. Her "revenge" was to start in 1970 a women-only art program at Fresno State College (where two of her students were Suzanne Lacy and Faith Wilding), which evolved the following year into the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), focused on group cooperation. The installation "Womanhouse" (1972), which took over an abandoned Hollywood mansion, was actually a cluster of installations created by about 30 students, notably Camille Grey's "Lipstick Bathroom" and Beth Bachenheimer's "Shoe Closet" She also made the "Pasadena Lifesavers" series of sprayed acrylics (1969-70) and the "Rejection Quintet" of drawings (1974). Her feminist vision culminated with "The Dinner Party", a reinterpretation of Leonardo's "The Last Supper" representing 1038 women in history, a massive installation that required the work of hundreds of volunteers for five years, first exhibited in San Francisco in 1979. In January 1973 Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and lesbian art historian Arlene Raven (born Arlene Rubin) founded an independent art school for women in Los Angeles: the Feminist Studio Workshop, whose location became known as the "Woman's Building" and whose "art galleries" (like the Womanspace gallery), all run by artist collectives, only presented female artists.

Judy Chicago's co-conspirator at the Feminist Art Program was the Canadian-born Miriam Schapiro, 17 years older than Judy Chicago, who had been an abstract expressionist painter in New York since 1951 (married to Paul Brach) and moved to UC San Diego in 1967 (with Brach). She had created works such as "Big Ox #1" (1967), an early example of computer art, made in collaboration with the physicist David Nalibof who programmed the computer to generate geometric patterns (that represented the vagina). Schapiro and Sherry Brody designed a centerpiece of the "Womanhouse": the "Dollhouse Room". Schapiro returned to New York City in 1974 made the four large-scale mix-media panels of "A Cabinet for All Seasons" (1974) which combined painting and textile. This piece launched the "Pattern and Decoration" movement that focused on traditional feminine arts like quilting and needlework, Her essay "Waste Not Want Not" (1978), co-written with Melissa Meyer, coined the term "femmage": a feminine collage of traditional women's arts like sewing and cooking.

Another pioneering feminist artist in Los Angeles was Carole Caroompas, a 1971 graduate from the University of Southern California, who made collages like "The Dreams of the Lady of the Castle Perilous" (1979) that includes reports of her dreams.

The Woman's Building became a fountainhead of provocative projects. Suzanne Lacy, Judy Chicago and others performed "Ablutions" (1972) about rape. Suzanne Lacy's "Violence" series consisted of large-scale events that took place in public spaces, notably "Three Weeks in May" (1977), that over three weeks staged performances in 90 locations of rapes, and "In Mourning and in Rage" (1977), the first of several collaborations with Leslie Labowitz. The performances of the Woman's Building were often choreographed in a grand sensational manner in order to attract coverage by news media.

Among the women who were involved with the Woman’s Building, Nancy Buchanan (UC Irvine class of 1971), a co-founder in 1971 of alternative F-Space art gallery, staged the performance "Hair Transplant" (1972), in which she shaved off all the hair from the body of a naked man. Nancy Youdelman (UCLA class of 1976), a student of Judy Chicago in Fresno and then at CalArts, created the installation "Self Portrait As Ophelia" (1977). Susan Mogul too studied at CalArts under Judy Chicago (although graduating later at UC San Diego in 1980) and pioneered video art with the funny seven-minute video "Dressing Up" (1973) and the provocative ten-minute "Take Off" (1974), in which she demonstrated her vibrator.

The most inflamatory stunt of feminist art was staged by New York's sculptor Lynda Benglism (hired at CalArts in 1972), who in November 1974 posted in Artforum a photograph (looking like a regular advert) of herself, naked and suntanned, wearing sunglasses, penetrating her vagina with a big plastic penis. She also pioneereed video art with "Now" (1973), a dialogue with herself.

In 1971 New York art historian Linda Nochlin published an essay titled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Five years later, in December 1976, Nochlin was one of the two curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of the exhibition "Women Artists 1550–1950", the first large-scale international exhibition of female artists only.

Black pioneers of assemblage such as Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge galvanized an entire generation of Black artists.

Between 1968 and 1970, Black painter Suzanne Jackson ran Gallery 32 out of her loft, a space that became a meeting place for Black artists. She organized in July 1970 the “Sapphire Show”, which exhibited works from six Black female artists: Gloria Bohanon, Yvonne Cole Meo, Betye Saar, Eileen Abdulrashid (later Eileen Nelson), and Sue Irons (later Senga Nengudi). It was Jackson who organized the "Black Expo" in San Francisco in 1972, bringing together almost 180 Black artists. At the same time, Black artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Charles White, Suzanne Jackson, and others formed the art collective Studio Z, based in Hammons' studio, formerly a dancehall, but devoted to improvisational and collective performances in unconventional spaces (freeway underpasses, abandoned warehouses, public parks, vacant lots, construction sites).

As an artist, Suzanne Jackson, who had studied at San Francisco State College as well as at the Pacific Ballet and performed in a music circus, made a book of poems and paintings, "What I Love" (1971), and painted the large-scale triptych "In A Black Man’s Garden" (1973).

David Hammons (Chouinard class of 1968), whom White informally mentored at Otis until 1972, made "body prints" in the vein of Yves Klein such as "Pray for America" (1969) and “Injustice Case” (1970) which mixed prints made with his own body (coated in cooking oils) with politically-charged symbols. He started commuting with New York in 1974.

Senga Nengudi (California State University, class of 1971) made a series of suspended nylon pantyhoses, "R.S.V.P." (1975). In 1978 Nengudi directed a performance by the Studio Z collective, "Ceremony for Freeway Fets", staged under a freeway overpass with Hammons and Hassinger dancing in costume to the music of their fellow artists. Trained as a dancer, her collaborator Maren Hassinger had graduated in 1973 in fiber arts from UCLA (a department just established by Bernard Kester). Their collaborations mixed sculpture, dance, theater and music, starting with a performance titled "R.S.V.P." (1977) in which Hassinger danced with Nengudi's nylon sculptures. On her own, Hassinger specialized in sculptures made of galvanized wire rope that looked like vegetation, such as "Twelve Trees" (1978).

Charles Gaines, a southerner who had been hired in 1967 by the California State University at Fresno, made works on paper such as the series titled "Incomplete Text" (1978-79), obtained by tinkering with the text of a book, and the series "Regression" (1973–74), created by simulating a mathematical algorithm.

The Pasadena-bred Betye Saar (UCLA) was already in her 40s when she turned to assemblages such as the iconic "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" (1972), a caricature armed with a gun and a grenade of a "Mammy" (a racist stereotype of the Jim Crow era).

The grand old man of Chicano street art was Chaz Bojorquez (Chouinard class of 1970), who had been painting graffiti since the skull stencil "Señor Suerte" (1969), one of the artists who set the standard for the graffiti lettering always sprayed in black paint, all capital letters.

Antonio Bernal graduated from the Art Center College of Design in 1966, joined Teatro Campesino in 1968 and became the first Chicano muralist when he painted "Farm Worker Mural" (1968).

The community organizer Francisca Flores founded in 1970 a magazine devoted to Chicano culture, in fact to Chicana issues: Regeneracion. She hired Harry Gamboa as the editor, and he hired his friends Gronk (Glugio Nicandro), Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herron. These four formed an agit-prop collective of Chicano performance artists and muralists that in 1973 adopted the name Asco Asco (Spanish for "nausea"). They staged performances such as the anti-war "Stations of the Cross" (1971). Willie Herron painted the metaphorical mural "The Wall That Cracked Open" (1972). In 1973 Herron and Gronk painted a large black-and-white mural about Chicano history, known as "Moratorium".

The Chicano art collective Los Four was formed in 1973 at UC Irvine by Gilbert Lujan (UC Irvine class of 1973), who later made the screenprint "Cruising Turtle Island" (1986), Frank Romero (an Otis graduate), who later painted "Death of Ruben Salazar" (1986), by Carlos Almaraz (Otis class of 1974), a devout Mexican-born Marxist who was painting murals in support of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, and Beto de la Rocha, who soon destroyed all his paintings. In February 1974 the Los Four got an exhibition at LACMA that was the first Chicano show staged by a museum (originally it had been staged at UC Irvine the previous December).

Another Chicano collective of muralists, Los Dos Streetscapers (aka the East Los Angeles Streetscapers), was founded in 1975 by David Botello, who had just made “Dreams of Flight” (1974), and Wayne Healy, who painted "Chicano Time Trip" (1977), and evolved into the East Los Streetscapers that in 1977 made the five-panel mural "Chicano Time Trip" depicting a century of Chicano history.

Other famous murals were “Inocencia” (1975) by Norma Montoya, “Organic Stimulus” (1975) and "White Eagle’s Dance" (1978) by Ernesto de la Loza, and "Homenaje a las Mujeres de Aztlan" (1977) by Judithe Hernandez and Carlos Almaraz

San Diego's Chicano muralist movement was born in 1970 when the city created Chicano Park under the Coronado Bridge, an area predominantly Chicana. The park quickly became an open-air museum of murals. One of the early muralists at Chicano Park, Victor Ochoa, co-founded the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, which trained a new generation of muralists.

Mechanicano, a cooperative gallery founded in 1969 by community organizer Victor Franco, organized in 1972 a mural program at the Ramona Gardens Housing Project, which came to include Wayne Healy's "Ghosts of the Barrio" (1974) and Armando Cabrera's "La Virgen de Guadalupe" (1974).